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Considering Pigeons for Carrying Delay Tolerant Networking Based Internet Traffic in Developing Countries
Author(s) -
Scholl Jeremiah,
Lindgren Anders
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the electronic journal of information systems in developing countries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.41
H-Index - 18
ISSN - 1681-4835
DOI - 10.1002/j.1681-4835.2012.tb00383.x
Subject(s) - delay tolerant networking , computer science , computer network , the internet , network packet , telecommunications , telephone network , internet traffic , world wide web , routing protocol , optimized link state routing protocol
There are many regions in the developing world that suffer from poor infrastructure and lack of connection to the Internet and Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN). Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) is a technology that has been advocated for providing store‐and‐forward network connectivity in these regions over the past few years. DTN often relies on human mobility in one form or another to support transportation of DTN data. This presents a socio‐technical problem related to organizing how the data should be transported. In some situations the demand for DTN traffic can exceed that which is possible to support with human mobility, so alternative mechanisms are needed. In this paper we propose using live carrier pigeons (columba livia) to transport DTN data. Carrier pigeons have been used for transporting packets of information for a long time, but have not yet been seriously considered for transporting DTN traffic. We provide arguements that this mode of DTN data transport provides promise, and should receive attention from research and development projects. We provide an overview of pigeon characteristics to analyze the feasibility of using them for data transport, and present simulations of a DTN network that utilizes pigeon transport in order to provide an initial investigation into expected performance characteristics.